Slouching towards vague authoritarianism is scary enough
What's really scary is ideological purity leading to an American hard-right equivalent of Mao's disastrous cultural revolution
https://www.theverge.com/elon-musk/617427/musk-trump-doge-recession-unemployment https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/59c1bbf47fe79e957f28fd4c10fc69163be35371f71a2ffd90813bad6ae6b8eb.webp
Bad review
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/330e137449f1e7c5441bd10b2884c20ceff43b6945860674ac7887c2dc60ae97.webp https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/564fe00fd92c6463153811851f7a1a0cd00d0c311ed0fd17a5c287ce9f1f3bd1.webp https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/9148a975176f7b9128ffd0a271ac8e71f945debde4677d131f5c7e929706bda7.webp
"U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users' encrypted accounts
Secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world, which if implemented would undermine Apple's privacy pledge to its users.
…
Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security"
Given the US is violated its free trade agreements, then Canada and Mexico are no longer bound to respect the agreements to enforce anti-competitive IP practices that benefit US big tech
Prosperity via competing app stores and jailbroken vehicles?
Happy Brigid's Day, the first day of spring (Imbolc) according to the Celtic calendar
(I know it's still cold, but the druids went strictly by the Sun)
Brigid was a Celtic goddess, appropriated by the christians as St. Brigid, and re-appropriated in modern Ireland as a symbol of feminism
Scientific American, I love you, but please read the room
This is not helping 🧪 https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/4bd0c42462dea468c2799803b12539a0317053024f0f16575b3dfa728a91fac5.webp
Today Meta revealed that the Paragon spyware is surveiling journalists and others who are using WhatsApp
Four months ago it was reported that ICE had signed a one year contract with that same spyware company
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/dc2f30130001c4da2c5845f97b2071c5338cccaffa52e3ea309c28c8de0d2e34.webp https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/22695bf9a93bf3b90ef11c31733a41f55088fb58112ac3e0ce2dceec07a22a50.webp
Happy Data Privacy Day, to those who celebrate
What ICE calls a "warrant" is often not valid for entry into a private building or vehicle
For that it must be signed by a judge
Today the doorman of an office building was able to prevent plainclothes ICE officers from coming into the building to question janitors
This is bad for American's privacy
But it also totally undercuts the legal basis for transferring EU data to the US
Expect new Internet walls between US and EU
Reminder that Trump whisperer and tech billionaire Andreessen has said:
'We have enemies.…
“sustainability”,
“ESG”,
“Sustainable Development Goals”,
“social responsibility”,
“stakeholder capitalism”,
“Precautionary Principle”,
“trust and safety”,
“tech ethics”,
“risk management”'
Totally agree. I've no interest in crypto, and haven't found any other topics other than Nostr itself
Last year I even tried a coding projects to see if I could find some subsets of relays that had interesting posts, but what I discovered was that all relays (or at least all ones that were reasonably responsive) had more or less the same posts
Legal arguments for how the states can act to protect privacy, now that the stakes are higher:
This is great advice
"LLMs are good at transforming text into less text
…LLMs only reliably know what you just told them, don't rely on training data
…LLMs cannot write for you
…Let them self-correct, multiple times if necessary
…Have the LLM do as little as possible"
https://seldo.com/posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-apps-so-far
So, Andreessen drops the veil and reveals why he turned against the Democrats. It was self interest, given they tried to rein in ("terror campaign" in his overwrought words) the crypto scams that he was invested in, and might have put some guardrails around AI
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qk4.Q4Xv.TyT8QVVEzapV https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f023f37445c2640ac064cbbec52095add842ff46f1e532b0890cfae9a7c7bf41/27fac2676b38482764686de5411db5966449185fd604a625a4f4ccd80517e8ec.webp
Thaumaturgy is the correct name for LLM system prompt engineering
We consult our grimoires as we weave our words into incantations thst control the magick
The VC-bros on the All In podcast have started talking credulously about aliens constructing the pyramids, and the Ancient Apocalypse lost Ice Age civilization pseudoscience
It makes me question how trustworthy they are in evaluating the science and tech in their investments